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A response to limited atonement

Monday, 07 April, 2003

D.A. Carson argues against Limited Atonement, the third point of five-point Calvinism. It is basically saying that Christ died for the elect (God's chosen people) and only the elect:

God so loved the world that he gave his Son (John 3:16). I know that some try to take kosmos (‘world’) here to refer to the elect. But that really will not do. All the evidence of the usage of the word in John's Gospel is against the suggestion. True, world in John does not so much refer to bigness as to badness. In John's vocabulary, world is primarily the moral order in wilful and culpable rebellion against God. In John 3:16 God's love in sending the Lord Jesus is to be admired not because it is extended to so big a thing as the world, but to so bad a thing; not to so many people, as to such wicked people. Nevertheless elsewhere John can speak of ‘the whole world’ (1 John 2:2), thus bringing bigness and badness together. More importantly, in Johannine theology the disciples themselves once belonged to the world but were drawn out of it (e.g. John 15:19). On this axis, God's love for the world cannot be collapsed into his love for the elect.

D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God: “On distorting the love of God”, Intervarsity Press, 2000.

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